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NEWS FEATURE ‘‘


At least with a print book you buy it and then do what you want with it. With ebooks there are endless variables: How many people can access it? How many simultaneously? Does it have artificial scarcity or expiry built in? – Caroline Ball


who wanted access to the book worked in a department on a different site to the library making it impractical to use the physical book. This clinician also said that when informa- tion is not easily available, medics use social media, point- ing to a research paper (https://tinyurl.com/toxiccompetition) that said UK medical student and doctor Reddit pages have over 40,000 members. One of the authors of the report, Jonny Guckian, derma- tology registrar and Advanced Medical Education Fellow, agreed with Neena’s assessment of the impact on users. He told Information Professional that physical books were rarely used in clinical situations. Weekly ‘difficult cases’ meetings involved phones, laptops, PubMed and Google Scholar – not unsearchable 500-page physical books. Similarly, to revise – he recently took his registrar exams – he bought his own ebooks because they can be tagged and were searchable. In an article in Future Health Care (https://tinyurl.com/socialand- medics) Jonny points out that social media is gaining influence as a source for many at the expense of conventional knowledge sources, saying there needs to be “meaningful engagement from leadership organisations in our field, particularly from those who have previously seen social media as too risky”. With this in mind, more comprehensive digital access to these conventional knowledge sources within institutions would be valuable.


Unlocking eBooks roundtable.


licence allowed access for a total of just 10 unique users over the entire five-year period, with no renewals and a seven-day loan limit per user.” So only 10 individuals can access this ebook during the five- year licence. Furthermore they would only be able to loan the book for seven days each over those five years. All together that’s 70 days at a cost of around £40 a day. In contrast this ebook for a private individual would cost £445.96 in perpetuity and a print version costs £429. Not surprisingly, the case study said: “Unable to justify the


restrictive eBook licence, the library purchased the four-volume print set, limiting access to a reference-only basis on-site. This restriction directly impacts medical students’ and clinicians’ access to the latest essential medical knowledge, affecting their ability to make informed clinical decisions and, ultimately, compromising patient care.” Highlighting this examples and other difficulties around ebook licensing to MPs using the project’s template letter is one of Neena’s next aims.


Digital depth Why does this example matter? Neena said that the clinician


Summer 2025


Close to home Another aspect of the close-to-homeness of this story is that MPs and Peers have library services that provide them with confidential fact checking services. Like many other libraries they have been affected by changes to eBook licensing made by Clarivate. MPs and peers can ask their librarians any ques- tions about public policy issues – but also about their library’s resources, including eBooks – and will get replies that are con- fidential to them and without any advocacy.


Let libraries be libraries “KR21 believes that copyright law and unfair contract law needs to be updated in order to “let libraries be libraries,” Ben White said, “eBooks turn the role of a library all on its head as we rent collections year in year out with little to show for it at the end of the day. The government should recognise that like consumers who cannot negotiate a contract with a large business, libraries face a huge imbalance of power with pub- lishers. This is because in order to function as a library, they must have access to the books that many publishers offer. Without concerted attention from policy makers on the sub- ject of eBooks, as we see with the reliance by NHS clinicians on Reddit, we risk further undermining access to research – the very basis of our knowledge economy.” IP


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 13


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